How we measure the Career Map

The Career Map is an inventory of work interests for self-knowledge and career exploration. You answer about activities, values and confidence, and you get a description of your affinities and a list of occupations to explore.

It is not a psychological test, a consultation with a psychologist or career counseling, which in Brazil only licensed psychologists may provide (Law 4,119/1962, art. 13). It issues no document about you and decides nothing: it neither points you to nor away from any profession.

The terms of use forbid a company or school from using the result to decide about anyone.

The map uses the RIASEC model, proposed by John Holland: six interest types that describe both people and work environments. The core idea is congruence: people who work in a setting that resembles their interests tend to be more engaged and to stay.

The types are usually drawn on a hexagon, with neighbors more alike. The six types show up in research from many countries, but the order around the hexagon doesn’t always replicate outside the US (Rounds & Tracey, 1996). The Brazilian adaptation of the O*NET® Interest Profiler found the six components without confirming the hexagon (Teixeira & López Castillo, 2020). That is why your result rests on the six scores and the three-letter code; the hexagon is just the drawing.

There are four blocks, all on the same 5-point scale: from “Strongly dislike” to “Strongly like” for interests, from “Not important” to “Essential” for values and from “Not at all” to “Completely” for confidence.

• Interests, 48 items. From the Oregon Vocational Interest Scales (ORVIS) of the International Personality Item Pool, which is in the public domain (Pozzebon et al., 2010): the 8 highest-loading items on each of the six core scales, one per type. In English these are the published originals; the Portuguese and Spanish translations are ours and have no published Brazilian validation study yet.
• Work values, 18 items. Three statements of our own for each of the six values used in the O*NET® database: achievement, independence, recognition, relationships, support and working conditions.
• Confidence, 6 items. One statement of our own per type (“I feel capable of…”). It comes from social cognitive career theory (Lent, Brown & Hackett, 1994): enjoying something and feeling capable of it are different, and both matter.
• Attention, 2 items. Check questions, together with a minimum time per answer and detection of repeated patterns. When something fails, the result is flagged as less reliable, as in the IQ test.

• Each type gets the average of its 8 answers, on a 0 to 4 scale. Those six numbers are what you see on the map.
• The three-letter code brings together the three types with the highest averages, in order.
• Differentiation is the distance between the highest and the lowest type. A flat profile (enjoying almost everything, or almost nothing) calls for a more careful reading of the code.
• Consistency tells whether the first two letters are neighbors on the hexagon. It is reading information, not a grade.
• Values become an order, from most to least important. Confidence is read per type and crossed with interest in the “I enjoy it and feel capable” quadrant.

The occupations come from the O*NET® 31.0 database, published under the CC BY 4.0 license, which records for each occupation its interest profile, its preparation level (Job Zone; version 31.0 has 4 zones, with zones 1 and 2 merged) and the abilities it uses. Work values come from version 30.2 of the same database. IQNorth modified this information: it selected 183 occupations that exist in Brazil, translated the names and wrote its own descriptions.

The matching compares your profile with each occupation’s by shape (the correlation between the six scores) and by level (the average of your scores on the first two letters of the occupation’s code, divided by 4). Occupations appear in three preparation groups, unfiltered: none drops off the list because of schooling. Values are used to break ties and to explain (“matches what you value”).

You see 12 occupations, each with its reason: the letters in common and the values. There is no salary range in this version, because we don’t yet have a measured source for Brazil.

If you took the IQ test, the areas where you did best show up as “a strength that helps with…”, linked to the abilities the database records for each occupation. They never exclude or downgrade a career.

Interests help explain choices and engagement, with modest but real effects. In a review of 92 studies, the fit between a person’s profile and the job’s was related to performance at 0.32, against 0.16 for the interest score alone (Nye et al., 2017).

The link with job satisfaction is smaller: 0.19 in a meta-analysis of 105 studies (Hoff et al., 2020). Satisfaction also depends on management, coworkers and pay, which no inventory measures.

Interests measured at the end of high school predicted life outcomes 10 years later, beyond what IQ and personality already explained (Stoll et al., 2017). It is a reason to measure interests alongside reasoning, not instead of it.

• The Portuguese and Spanish translations of the items are ours and have no published Brazilian validation yet. When there is enough data, the reliability figures of the scales will be added to this page.
• The result describes preferences you stated today. It doesn’t measure talent or ability.
• The occupations are examples to explore. The job market, the training available and your own situation change what makes sense, and no map can see that.
• Interests change with new experience. It’s worth retaking it after 6 months.
• Rushed answers or repeated patterns make the profile less reliable, and the result tells you when that happens.

If you are facing a hard choice, such as a degree, a career change or a fresh start, career counseling with a licensed psychologist goes beyond any inventory: it involves interviews, instruments approved for that use and follow-up. Look for a professional licensed in your region.